Coming in Autofac 2.3 - OnRelease()

Sep 7, 2010 • nblumhardt

Most components that need to be cleaned up implement IDisposable, which Autofac will use when the component is due to be released. Some components however, notably WCF client proxies, have non-standard ‘release’ behaviour.

There have never been enough cases of these non-standard components to justify messing with the Autofac core model to provide custom release behaviours, so for some time (six major versions, in fact) this hasn’t been added.

Happily, for WCF proxies and other components like them, a simple implementation has been found that allows a custom release action to be piggy-backed on a regular disposable component, so in Autofac 2.3 (currently in preview) we’ll be offering OnRelease() for the first time:

Simple addition - hopefully a pleasant improvement in these scenarios.

For the curious, WCF client proxies require that calls to Dispose() be wrapped in try/catch blocks so that exceptions during disposal don’t obscure any other exceptions thrown during the use of the proxy itself. Not fun stuff, but relax, the Autofac.Integration.Wcf assembly now includes an implementation of UseWcfSafeRelease() as well.